A blog from the Khan Academy Computing team. We'll post on what we've released, what we're working on, and what we learn as we go along.

Friday, August 16, 2013

The "Tutorial-ization" of our CS Curriculum

When we first introduced Khan Academy Computer Science, our focus was on exploration and discovery, so we didn't follow the same tutorial structure as all the other topics on Khan Academy, with their progressions of tutorials and exercises. We loved seeing the crazy ways that students used the platform, to create everything from hypnotic animations to addictive games.

But we decided it was time to give students the option for a more structured approach to learning programming, and we embarked to "tutorial"-ize the CS curriculum. Thanks to our super summer interns Leif and Sophia, we launched the new interface for CS this week. This is our programming tutorial, what we recommend every learner start with:

Right now, the tutorials are a mix of videos and coding "talk-throughs", where you can watch us code on the left and see the result on the right. But we don't want students just passively watching, we want them practicing what they learn in the videos! So we're building out a whole new challenge framework based on StructuredJS, where we'll be able to provide step-by-step instructions, example code with placeholders, and suggestions. We'll also be adding more talk-throughs and subtopics, like functions, arrays, loops, and objects. Stay tuned!